Zofia Posmysz

In January 1945, as the battle front approached, thousands of prisoners from KL Auschwitz-Birkenau were marched deep into Germany. That ‘Death March’, as it has become called, claimed a still uncalculated number of victims. Prisoners from Birkenau walked for almost three days and finally in biting frost were transported in open wagons to Ravensbrück. Here, as Zofia Posmysz recalls, the next ordeal awaited the exhausted women: they had to spend 3 weeks under a kind of tent, sleeping on the bare earth. Zofia Posmysz was liberated by the Allies from the Neustadt-Glewe sub-camp on the 2nd of May 1945. She decided to return to Poland despite efforts to persuade her to remain in the zone controlled by the Allies. As one of a group of 20 she set out on foot (this has been immortali- sed in ’To Freedom, to Death, to Life’) reaching Kraków at the end of May. Her mother and younger brother awaited Zofia Posmysz was born in Kraków on the 23rd of her at the family home. Her father (a railway worker) had August 1923. When the war broke out she was a pupil at a died in August 1943, shot by the German Bahnschutz, so- school of commerce. The new circumstances forced her to mething she only learned on her return. Her older sister, interrupt her studies for a certain time. In order to avoid who was married, lived in Warsaw. Zofia Posmysz went deportation to Germany as forced labourer she took up to her there to find work and continue her schooling. She work as a waitress in a German casino, having been direc- passed her matura in 1946 and took up the study of Polish ted there by the Arbeitsamt (labour office). Soon she took literature at Warsaw University, combining this with ni- up her studies again in an illegal underground school. It ght-work as a proof reader for one of the newspapers. To- was here among the participants of the illegal course that wards the end of her studies she began working for Polish she came into contact with the underground press, distri- Radio in its literary department. buted by her classmates. Probably as a result of the work In 1959 she wrote the radio-play, ‘The Passenger of an informer, the whole group was arrested on the 15th in Cabin 45’, that was decisive for her literary career. The of April 1942. After six weeks in prison Zofia Posmysz was resonance it evoked led quickly to its adaptation as a play sent on the 30th of May 1942 to the women’s section of the for television, and the outstanding director Andrzej Munk main camp at Auschwitz, but she was there only a short decided to make a film of, ‘The Passenger’. The film – with while. One of the prisoners working on cleaning the banks among others the phenomenal role of Aleksandra Śląska of the Soła river managed to escape and in retaliation Zofia as Liza – appeared on the screen immediately after the de- Posmysz’s whole sub-camp of some 200 people was sent ath of the director in 1963. A year earlier ‘The Passenger’ to a punishment battalion located in Budy near Oświęcim. had appeared in the form of a novel and on the basis of In inhuman conditions, starved and beaten, and above all that, in 1968, Mieczysław Weinberg composed the ope- forced to carry out heavy labour, the women struggled de- ra score to Aleksander Miedwiedew’s libretto. Its world sperately to survive. After two months the surviving 143 premier at the Bregenz Festival in 2010 was a great artistic members of the group were sent to Birkenau, where a wo- event, and consolidated the position of ‘The Passenger’, men’s section of the camp had been opened. Some years as one of the most important works on the subject of the later Zofia Posmysz recounted this episode of her camp camps, extraordinary and exceptional in so far as it com- career in ‘Sängerin’. bined the perspectives of the drama of war of both the vic- Birkenau was a new stage in the ordeal of the tim and the oppressor, usually kept distinct. camps. It began dramatically for her – with typhus and The fame of ‘The Passenger’ somewhat oversha- dysentery decimating the prisoners (see her story ’That dowed the other important works of Zofia Posmysz inclu- same Doctor M’), but soon came an unexpected change for ding the novels ‘Holiday on the Adriatic’, ‘Microclimate’ the better: in March 1943 she was transferred to the camp and ‘The Price’, the stories already mentioned and many kitchen and two months later was promoted to the func- radio plays, scripts and works on contemporary themes. tion of book-keeper. It was then that she met Tadeusz Pa- The account of ‘The Christ from Auschwitz’, an elabora- olone-Lisowski, brought from the men’s camp to prepare tion of one of the episodes in ‘The Passenger’ is without her for her new task of book-keeping. doubt one of the most important elements of the testimony She wrote about this encounter in, among others, given by the life of this outstanding author, and extraordi- ‘The Christ from Auschwitz’. nary woman.

Text prepared by Janusz Toczek; Photograph: Zofia Posmysz in the 1960s Portrait of Zofia Posmysz by Zofia Bator, drawn in Auschwitz Zofia Posmysz in 1944 in 1940

Photographs taken for the records during registration at KL Auschwitz in 1942 (photo: archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum)

Zofia Posmysz during a meeting in the cycle ‘Literature and Memory. In the Shadow of the Medallion’ at the International Youth Meeting Centre, 2008